ArticleRanks is one of the blog networks I use and it plays a major role in SEO backlinking to help to increase ranking of my sites. ArticleRanks allows you to submit articles in spun format and your articles will be distributed to their network of blogs, based on the quality of your articles. In this ArticleRanks review post, I will be sharing how I use ArticleRanks so that you can decide if ArticleRanks is suitable for you.

Why ArticleRanks?

If you would like to get free organic traffic from search engine, then you must be doing some SEO to your site and posts. Apart from doing the essential on page SEO, a large portion of the effort should be focused on off page SEO, which is SEO link building process.

You are probably aware of article marketing, which you write an article and submit to an article directory in order to gain 1 or 2 backlinks. Submitting to article directory is time consuming process and what’s worse is that sometimes your article was rejected. Even if your article get published, you only get 1 or 2 backlinks for each published article.

Another good option is to use software such as Article Marketing Robot to do mass submission to thousands of article directories to super charge your effort in article marketing. However, most of the sites that publish your articles do not have high page rank, which is a critical factor in terms of building backlinks.

ArticleRanks – What Can It Do For You?

This is where ArticleRanks come into the picture. ArticleRanks network consists of thousands of blogs with page rank contributed by webmasters that are ready to accept good quality article. You are allowed to place up to 3 contextual links with your anchored text within the article body. Just for your information, contextual backlink is the best type of backlink (much better than blog comment, profile link, forum signature, side bar links, etc…) that you can get in terms of link building.

After you submit your spun articles, the articles will be distributed to the blogs that requested the articles for specific category. Some of the blogs will accept the articles automatically based on the uniqueness of the article. Some of the blog owners will manually approve the article to publish the article. Generally, it takes around 8 weeks to get 40-60 syndication for each of your article submitted.

That means you will get around 120 contextual backlinks for each of your submitted article when your article get syndicated 40 times. Most of the backlinks are from domains with page rank (range from PR1-4). Backlinks from domains with page rank are a lot more valuable in SEO link building.

ArticleRanks Review

Plans

There are 3 types of membership plans available for ArticleRanks and the difference is summarize in the table below:

Free / Credit

Starter $39.99

Pro $89.99

Limited to 6 domains

Limited to 10 domains

Unlimited domains

1 top level category for free

1 top level category for free

3 top level category for free

2 credits to submit 1 article

Unlimited articles

Unlimited articles

Social Bookmarking to distributed articles

Social Bookmarking to distributed articles

Submission of updates to Twitter and Facebook

Priority distributions

For the free membership, each time you submit an article will cost you 2 credits. You have 2 ways to earn the credits:

Add a sites with Page Rank of at least 1

Buy Credits

For myself, I am on a free membership and all I do is to buy a few domains with Page Rank and add them into ArticleRanks blog network to receive articles on my sites to accumulate credits. You can also buy credits but it is very costly in my opinion because it cost $2 for 1 credit. So, adding a few domains with Page Rank is the feasible and affordable option.

Article Submission

Each article is allowed to contain up to 3 backlinks with your anchored text. You can also add a Youtube Url with an anchor text on top of the 3 backlinks to mix it into your article. For free and starter plans, you can choose 1 top category for free. If you would like to have your article to gain more exposure and be syndicated a lot more, you can choose more than 1 but that will cost you 2 credits. I always stick to 1 category for each article.

Article Format

Every article submitted via ArticleRanks is to be in spun format, as shown in the following format:

First level: [word1|word2|word3]

Secondary level:{sentence1~sentence2~sentence3}

It is crucial to have your spun article as unique as possible. It is also suggested by ArticleRanks to have your articles spun to at least 150%-300% unique. The more unique your article, the higher chance your article will be accepted and published to the blog networks. Every blog that webmasters added to the ArticleRanks bog network, they will have an option to choose to only accept article that achieve specific uniqueness, such as higher than 300%, 150%, 100%, etc…

There is a built in spinner in the ArticleRanks system. However, it is very tedious and time consuming to do the spinning manually and that’s why I am using articles generated from Article Builder by Jon Leger. The uniqueness of !ll my articles are over 1,000% in both title and body. So, I don’t need to worry about the uniqueness of the articles submitted.

Article Stats

At the moment, you can check out the stats of the articles you submitted so that you know how many times your articles have been accepted and published. Unfortunately, just like most of the publish blog network, live URLs for the published articles are not provided.

Indexing

Indexing is critical in SEO link building. If your articles are not indexed, simply your backlinks are not seen by Google and they are pretty much useless. ArticleRanks help the indexing process by generating RSS of each published articles and ping the RSS Url and article URL. This applies to all the plans.

If you are on Starter or Pro plans, they will also social bookmark all the published articles and updates on Twitter and Facebook (Pro plans).

Watch the video below to see how I use Article Builder to generate high quality spintax ready article and use it for ArticleRanks:

ArticleRanks Drawbacks

Article Submission Interface

The process of submitting appears to be laggard to me as every time you choose a category and submit the articles the loading time is slow. Also, there is no preview button before you submit the article. You can only submit, view then edit the article if necessary.

Limitation of Domains

JFor Free account, you are allowed to use up to 6 domains and 10 domains for free and starter plans respectively. Only the pro account gives you unlimited domains option. What does it mean to you?

If you have only a few money sites, it is fine to have a free/starter plan. This is a very affordable option if you own only a few authority sites with tons of pages and you don’t need to worry about exceeding the limitation of the domains. However, if you would like to build 2nd tier backlinks to other sites such as Ezine Article or web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, WordPress, etc… You are most likely need a Pro account to give you unlimited domains.

Conclusion

ArticleRanks is definitely a good blog network that is recommended. It will help you to build quality contextual backlinks over a few weeks without minor effort, which is really a great thing for link building as it looks a lot more natural to Google.

If you are just starting out to build backlinks with blog network, ArticleRanks is definitely worth to try because you can use it for free and it delivers good results.

ArticleRanks is still working great but do make sure you have a proper SEO backlinking plan before you start building backlinks. Without a proper backlinking structure, backlinks might harm the site ranking

I used to use ArticleRanks service for a while, but not anymore. Nevertheless, it’s a good concept, but I think the effectiveness is much decreased due to the lack of quality sites in the network. People usually buys aged domains with some pagerank, splash up the wordpress and then let the boatload of all crappy content published that comes from such network – in exchange for their own crappy scraped and spun article gets published.

You can’t expect quality materials coming in from such places as the blog networks, if everything that all people is doing there is pumping in the spun low-quality articles. And ArticleRanks does have a lot of them!

I was very interested in this until I looked at the date the post was published. Is this still relevant in today’s constantly changing world of seo or is there something much more efficient now????? LeeLee recently posted..Magnesium Fire Starter

I have written many blog posts for my site over the years but because of the nature of the site (financial / investment) have had trouble attracting a large following. I take it with spinning I could use some of my better past posts to add additional links into my site that might bring traffic? Or would your recommend writing new articles either just for this site or that can be spun.

I spin article for link building purpose on Web2.0 sites, blog networks, etc…

If you have found some great post with awesome response, i.e. lots of visitors or lots of comments, you can tackle from this angle because you already know what people love to read, just don’t spin the blog post.

@Joni Betink: Since it is free, just give it a go and test out the features. However bear in mind to diverse your anchor text as much as possible so that it looks natural in the eye of Google, i.e. 30% of your main keyword, 40% of naked URL + redundant text like click here and your domain name, 30% of LSI keywords, etc…Ming Jong recently posted..Fully Automated Online Business? The Right Way To Generate Passive Income

Just signed up for the free account a week ago. I added my high PR sites (1 PR4, 1PR3) and have already earned over 150 credits. So I don’t need to pay anything for a while. I will, however, start paying the $39.99 when I want to start receiving backlinks to my backlinks (with their social bookmarking feature). Thanks for the great review.

@Mike: Absolutely Mike. These credits will keep you going for a while. If you want to take the link building on steroid, the paid plan is the way as you can submit unlimited amount of articles, without worrying about the credits, plus the advantage of having Social bookmarking to your submitted articles on autopilot.Ming Jong recently posted..Article Marketing Robot Review And Case Study

Hello Ming, Would you recommend ArticleRanks over the new Seo Link Monster network? Have you given that one a try? If so, what is your opinion? Thanks.Adam recently posted..Makita BBX7600 Backpack Blower Review

@D Phillipe: So far, blog network is considered the most powerful SEO weapon to help the ranking in terms of effort and time to see the results. Yes, some of them are costly so that’s why I recommend to start with the blog network with free plan to get started. For the no. of posts, it really depends on the competition of the keyword you target.Ming Jong recently posted..AWeber – Is AWeber The Best Deal of Autoresponder?

Interesting set-up. $4 to submit an article does not seem overly expensive. Much less than a monthly plan, unless you write and spin n steroids! I will check into this.David Leonhardt recently posted..Tough Winter to Make Solar Money

@David Leonhardt: It is a great start to let you to try and see how they work. However, you wouldn’t want to just submit 1 article to the blog network. With the free plan, you still can submit for free when you add a site with PR to receive articles.Ming Jong recently posted..Link Wheel Strategy That Works